Star-crossed lovers like you've never seen them before

Angelin Preljocaj always found classical ballet constraining. So what's he doing with that mainstay of the repertoire, Romeo and Juliet? Re-inventing it.

Oh no, not another danced Romeo and Juliet. In the league of ubiquity, Romeo and Juliet comes pretty close to that inescapable classic Swan Lake. This being the version by Angelin Preljocaj, though, it was going to be different, worth a sneak Provençal look in the Gallo-Roman amphitheatre of Vaison-la-Romaine, before its arrival in London as part of Dance Umbrella.

Oh no, not another danced Romeo and Juliet. In the league of ubiquity, Romeo and Juliet comes pretty close to that inescapable classic Swan Lake. This being the version by Angelin Preljocaj, though, it was going to be different, worth a sneak Provençal look in the Gallo-Roman amphitheatre of Vaison-la-Romaine, before its arrival in London as part of Dance Umbrella.

The esteem for Preljocaj is almost as ubiquitous as Romeo and Juliet. The Paris Opera and New York City ballets have commissioned several works from him. He is artistic advisor to the Berlin Ballet and leads his own widely touring Ballet Preljocaj. The latter's British debut was in a Dance Umbrella eleven years ago, with Liqueurs de Chair (1988), a brilliant essay in provocation that dangerously linked sexual and religious imagery. Then came other programmes, among them a Ballets Russes homage in which he rewrote works such as Les Noces, likening brides to manipulated marionettes.

Now it's Romeo and Juliet, so charged with drama it might be shoving a brief but violent fist into your guts and your heart. Originally made in 1990 for the Lyons Ballet and adapted for Preljocaj's company in 1996, it takes the story into the harsh twilight of a police state, where Capulet muscle-power crushes an underclass that includes the Montagues. Preljocaj uses an edited tape of Prokofiev, interspersed with electronic passages by Goran Vejvoda. His dance is searing realism choreographed into artistic patterns. "Each time I try to invent afresh, to find a movement style appropriate to the theme or character."

Choreographing is nowhere as easy as most of us think. Although he incorporates a lot of naturalistic gesture, he must first analyse it carefully in order to transform it into art. And there is always the unpredictable yawning gulf between intention and realisation. "Sometimes you can arrive with a big and wonderful idea, but when you start working with the dancers it reveals itself to be pathetic."

Sex often occupies a large place in his work. "Choreography is after all an art focused on the human body," he argues. Le Parc (to Mozart) for the Paris Opera Ballet contains the most erotic, most affecting, most ravishing pas de deux you have ever seen. The pas de deux in Romeo and Juliet are inevitably less balletic. But they carry the shock of brutal physicality made beautiful, a thrilling virtuosity impelled by inner emotional fire. His 25 dancers have to plunge themselves, body and soul, into what they do, and being just a deft mover in this company is not enough. "I look for a personality who can dance really well, rather than someone in the mould of a dancer."

Vaison-la-Romaine is 140km from Aix-en-Provence, the home of the Ballet Preljocaj. Six years ago, Preljocaj almost settled in Britain, when he was invited to co-direct London Contemporary Dance Theatre with Richard Alston: a project scuppered by LCDT's dissolution. Then began a Preljocaj Diaspora. With LCDT gone, he accepted a simultaneous offer to head the Ballet du Nord (in Roubaix), integrating his own dancers into the company. "But people started to get worked up because of articles in the regional press saying I was a pornographic choreographer and impossibly avant-garde... the mayor who had first invited me, completely caved in to the pressure. So I sent out a press release that I wasn't being supported and was leaving. And suddenly everybody - the local politicians, the journalists - were shouting they wanted me back. And I said to them, are you joking or what?" Instead he found his company another base at Châteauvallon, in the South. "I was so happy. We had a wonderful building, two studios, more money - and six months later the National Front takes power. In fact, it's at moments like that, that you are at your most free morally, because you have a clear choice. Jean-Paul Sartre said it: either you collaborate or you don't collaborate. So we left." For several months they had nowhere, then Aix-en-Provence opened their arms, lodging them in an arts centre and now building them a dance house to be completed next year.

He knows all about politics. His parents were Albanian political refugees. He has French nationality by just days, because his parents arrived at the close of 1956 and he was born 9 January. "So during all my childhood my parents were not yet integrated into French society. As soon as I would step out of the home, I would change countries." One of his proudest moments was going to Albania on an official invitation. "I was invited to dance at the opera house and I went with my parents. And it was incredible because they had been on the red list for a long time, which meant they were to be shot. But here they were in Tirana, at the opera house, very officially, with their son."

Albanian parents are no more favourable to dancing sons than other parents. But living in the Paris suburbs, he started ballet lessons aged about eleven, all because a girl at his school lent him a book. "Inside was a magnificent photo of Nureyev jumping and the caption said: 'Nureyev, transfigured by dance'. The word 'transfigured' seemed to mean that dance had a magical power to transform somebody, to make them beautiful and luminous. So I started going to the same ballet classes as the girl."

By age 16 or 17 ballet became less enticing. "At that time everybody around me was doing rock'n'roll and being punks, and tights really were not the thing! And also I could sense the creative limits of classical dance. I wanted to express what I could feel but I realised that ballet would not allow me to invent new forms." So he stopped for while, until someone told him about contemporary dance. "It was a revelation, something I had been wanting for a long time: to be able to dance, but with possibilities of invention."

For two years he studied intensively in Paris with the teacher Karin Waehner. "I took every single class she was teaching weekly. So I would go from an intermediate class to a professional class, then on to an evening class for ladies wanting to keep trim." To Waehner's expressive German brand of dance he added dispassionate American postmodernism, studying with Merce Cunningham and others in New York. Returning to France he worked with several companies and four years later, while dancing in Dominique Bagouet's troupe, he made his choreographic debut. The same year, 1984, he founded his company.

Up until two years ago he was still dancing. He misses being on stage. "I want to start again. But I don't know how. For example, I would have liked to dance the role of Romeo, but of course I never will, it's too athletic." While he ponders the question, he can take pleasure in family life, consisting of two daughters and a wife, Valérie Muller, a French film maker. And besides he's got plenty of choreographing to keep him busy.

Soon after London he shows a new programme of short pieces, followed in May by The Rite of Spring for the Berlin Ballet, with Daniel Barenboim conducting Stravinsky. The work will then be toured by his own company and performed at Paris's Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, where the ballet's 1913 premiere famously provoked a riot. Now we have got used to the music, Preljocaj's version will probably not, although you can never be sure.

Sadler's Wells, London EC1, tonight to Saturday (020-7863 8000)